On April 22nd
2012, being a Sunday a lot of middle class people probably spent Earth Day complaining,
while they were unwrapping their sweets, about other people’s carelessness toward
the environment, about the evils of capitalism, which destroys everything, and
about the tomatoes, which don’t taste like they used to.

At the same
time, more than 1.3 billion human beings spent their day like any other
damned day, unable to turn on a light bulb, because they don’t have access to
electricity. We are on the side of those 1.3 billion people; and we won’t be
comfortable celebrating anything, until they too will be able to enjoy, like we
do, the fruits of economic development.

Earth day was
celebrated for the first time on April 22, 1970. It’s been recurring since
then, dragging along the same list of complaints; but are these complaints
really justified? And do they correctly differentiate between cause and effect?

The data with which to amuse
oneself and to be amazed by, can be found here

In the least developed countries, (here ‘s the list), the harvest of grains per
farmed hectare, (2.471 acres), in the 2000 to 2010 decade, was roughly 43% more
than in the decade from 1970 to 1980.

In the same area of the world,
which was and still is in the worst conditions, life expectancy at birth grew
25%, from 45 to 56 years of age. Infant mortality decreased 42%, from 137 ‰ (per
mille) to 79 ‰ children born alive.

All these statistics are even
brighter, if we observe the world in its entirety, or if we take into
consideration just the other more fortunate developing countries. In China, for
example, life expectancy at birth grew from 65 years of age in the period from
1970 to 1980, to 72 years of age in the decade from 2000 to 2010.

Almost every other statistic is
equally or more encouraging. In the last decade, the world population has
become richer, it has achieved a better standard of living and it has narrowed
the inequality gap.

All of this was possible thanks to
capitalism and to the economic growth that it has made possible. Globalization
and the spreading of communication technology, which allow for a quicker
dissemination of information and knowledge, erased the distances between
countries and amplified a trend that was already occurring.

Where this did not happen, or in
countries where it occurred more slowly, it was because political circumstances
(domestic factors or issues related to international conflict) constrained the
great force of capitalism.

To quote the best passage ever
written, in praise of capitalism:

The
bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the
immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarians,
nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy
artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces
the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate.

The
bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more
massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations
together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry
to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs,
clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole
populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a
presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?

(Karl Marx. The Communist Manifesto)

Other great news is that this
incredible and positive growth was not achieved to the detriment of the
environment, as a lot of people who will celebrate Earth Day seem to think.

In fact, it’s true that the quality
of the environment initially tends to deteriorate, as societies become richer;
but when the basic needs are eventually met, the environment (a healthy one)
itself becomes a need. Therefore, after the environment has fueled the economic
growth, humanity repays its debt and returns a better planet, than the one it
has inherited, to the following generations. As a matter of fact, most environmental
indicators show a continuous and sustained improvement of conditions, after an
initial period of deterioration.

That takes us back to the beginning.
Notwithstanding the fact that the trends are positive, the situation remains
disappointing: still too many people on Earth suffer from hunger, thirst and
deprivations that we today can’t even imagine, in our blessed corners of the
industrialized world. Those individuals have the right to the same kind of
development we have enjoyed. It is possible. The technical instruments are
there; and so many technologies and production and commercial methods, which in
the past had not been invented, now exist. But to extend these instruments to
those who still don’t have access to them, it is necessary that those countries
create for themselves institutions compatible with the free market: they must
safeguard private property, contract, the freedom of movement for people,
merchandise and capital; but it is also imperative that the western countries
don’t impede this evolution, with their protectionism and their policies.

To use the analogy that Marx used, we
shouldn’t bombard those people and those goods with the immaterial cannons of
restrictions to immigration and to the movement of merchandise.

Protectionism hurts the victims and
the people who practice it: but it becomes absolutely unacceptable when it
entails throwing overboard the hopes and the future of those individuals who
were not as lucky as we were, to be born here. (The author speaks from an Italian perspective: every year dozens of Africans drown in the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe. ndt)

Protectionism sometimes masquerades
under the false cloak of environmental policy. Our policies, for the most part,
do not protect the environment but pursue economic and political agendas. They
protect constituencies and interest groups; to our detriment and to the
detriment of those 1.3 billion people who still don’t have electricity and who
still run the risk of asphyxiating, in houses, (if they can be called so), where
death hovers with the fumes that emanate from rudimentary stoves, or sneaks in
stealthily like an anopheles mosquito carrying malaria.

For all these reason, we (the people
of the Bruno Leoni Institute and I) won’t celebrate Earth Day. We don’t like to
celebrate wrong ideas, which confuse the pathology with its symptoms and want
to fight capitalism with poverty, instead of the opposite, hiding behind the
fig leaves of ecology.

We won’t celebrate Earth Day,
because too many people couldn’t do it, even if they wanted to.

We will continue to promote those
ideas and those reforms that could make the Earth a more hospitable and richer
world.